Kindness, evil, and teaching.

We want them strong like oaks; efficient, effective, safe, responsible. That's good. We should ask ourselves if we also want them to be human. Human in the sense of goodness.

Goodness has a bad reputation in our pragmatic world, even so it is the core of our species. As far as we move away from goodness, we lose humanity.

We want them to be empathic. I want them to experience empathy, feelings, emotions, understanding, respect. I want them to be flexible, dialogues. I want them to exercise an enough degree of reasonable tolerance.

I wish it for them and for the society they will build.

And I wonder if I have to punish them with harshness and without exceptions when they do not give the teacher all that they were asked. If I do not punish them, I run the risk of not preparing enough for a society that does not forgive the mistakes about time and time required. Even so, this last idea is the trap of the system.

The harsh and inhuman hardness of the system feeds on pedagogy that teaches us to live in a rugged and inhumane system. When I teach a boy or girl that when she does not deliver her or his homework, she or he will be punished, then I’m not only teaching her or him to be strong in this system, I’m also teaching him or her to become a controlling agent of this inflexibility. And this infelxibility is perpetuated. If I act like this, I teach him to be strict, not to understand, not to listen, and to turn (for someone else) into the difficulty against which I am preparing him or her.

On the other hand, If I decide that when he or she arrives and tells me that he or she has some family problems, trouble-makings, may be hard for him to be explained, and that have caused him or her to forget to take the order … so, if in these circumstances I listen to him or to her, and I encourage him or her to open up and tell me the problem, and if then, once I’ve listened to her or to him, I understand him or her, and so grant himor her one more day to deliver the work... Will not I be teaching him to be more human? Will not I be building a system that will work in a more harmonious way with the respect that individuals deserve as persons they are? Will not I be gaining his or her heart and making it more receptive to later teachings? Will not I make him or her stronger to resist a system that wants him or her to turn into an insect of the swarm?

I have the answer. Let each one answer for him.

My musical trip to IRELAND. Meeting Mickey McConnel and Gavin family.

On August 22, we met the Family Gavin, and their Gypsy Wagon TV. They had invited me to sing and to be recorded in their wagon, and I had the luck of knowing their natural paradise in the middle of Fintown's Nature; a green paradise of trees and grass, lakes, rivers... They were very kind with us and we spent a happy and nice afternoon of music and friendship. You can see their awesome channel of folk and music.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoiry3FOj-18ibNQe9FijDA

The other great experience of this summer was meeting Mickey McConnell.

First of all, I met the song. “Only our rivers run free”. I listened to it some years ago, through YouTube, sung by a young man in a pub of England; this man seemed a worker or a syndicalist, and he sang for freedom. I felt upset with that song, it made me cry and I didn’t know why. May be It happened because its meaning was applicable to the situation of my country, Catalonia. As I told you, It happened some years ago.

From that moment on, I searched and I discovered that that song was written by a man called “Mickey McConnell”. I learnt things about him. He was born in Northen Ireland. His song “Only our rivers run free” talked about the constittutional status of Ulster, and this song became a hit in Ireland in 1968. He made many other songs like “The little drummer boy” and “Follow the flag”. The songs of Mickey were sung by singers like Christy Moore, The Wolfe Tones, Mary Black, The Kelly Family, The James Last Orchestra...

I listened “Only our rivers run free” again in YouTube from a young singer called Sheena (now she is older and lives and sings in pubs from New York. Few weeks ago she was in derry) and I cried again. Finally I learnt to sing this song, and... from time to time, even now, I perform it in the kitchen of my home for my daughter. Now she is 11, but when she was three or four, she hardly ate his dinner, and I sang this song, an others too, so that she had dinner easier, and really she did. Now, I have just made a Catalan version of the song. I told it to Mickey last night and he loved the idea.

So… after all that… I met Mickey McConnell through facebook one or two years ago. This summer, my family and me decided to visit Ireland and I asked Mickey where did he sing and he told me about McMunns, in Ballybunion. We went to have a dinner there on August, 26, and it was great, magic, exciting… My family and me enjoyed a lot, and, in two occasions, Mickey put his guitar on my hands and asked me to sing a couple of songs. It was very exciting to contribute to the magic of the pub with two Catalan songs. If only I had knew that I was going to sing I would have prepared some irish song; I usually sing “Grace” and “The great majestic Shannon” but I don’t know them by heart, and I sang two Catalan songs that I remember and feel very well. Anyway, It was great. The atmosphere of the McMunns was bewitching, entrancing, gripping, awesome… Mickey sang “only our rivers run free” “Viva la quinta brigada” and many others. Other man whom name I don’t remember that had been a very good football trainning (and player) many years before sang too (a deep song about a worker). A woman stood up and sang too (Me and Bobby McGee). Mickey made us feel welcomed; he dedicated songs to us, he explained to the whole pub that we had come from Catalonia, he introduced ourselves to one of the owners of McMunns and some other kind people, he helped us to feel very happy in a warm and kind human climate. That night, the Irish people of McMunns turned out to be like a group of friends for us, openminded, open to other culture (Catalan culture), cheery…

So… I want to thank Mickey such a wonderful night, three days before I turned fifty years old.

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Singing in GypsyWagonTV

Singing in GypsyWagonTV, on August, 22, 2018. In Fintown (Donegal, Ireland).

Children in cages

Children in cages,

and tyrants in the White House.

Smoke in suburbs.

Maroon velvet rugs under the feet of an artificial fool.

Children in cages and human beasts in the White House.

Those who have a sick soul inhabit the palaces of the republic.

The fighters languish in the suburbs.

Where have the America of California gone?

You no longer wear flowers in your hair.

You were afraid of the freedom of your soul

and you decided to imitate 

the decadent and unfair tawdriness of the Sun King 

and all the pathetic kings in the world

that are considered superior people.

Where have all the flowers gone?

They ripped them out of the earth 

and kept in the wicker basket 

of an old grandmother who had lost her head.

They now stink, and they will not be longer flowers.

Where is the harmonics of Key West?

Where does the girl with eyes of heaven live?

The girl who swam in the nude under the bridge of San Francisco?

She abhorred freedom because of a bad hangover,

and because of the silver mirrors 

with which they bought the sacred message of the Great Spirit.

Where are you John Sebastian?

Where did you leave the younger generation?

You don’t ask your darling to be home soon anymore.

You no longer stop your song in Woodstock to make the audience sing.

Where did you leave the spoon and the dreams?

Children in cages

Children in cages

Kids in cages and decadence in the White House.

Robert Conway, Shangrila, June 19, 2018

A better life

I think you've got me mixed up

when you direct me to expire

the sweet deep wish for wind and sand

for wildness and the pure desires

shining near the waves and foam

under the burning sky of fire.

I think you've got me mixed up.

Further the water, the line of dreams,

my heart is born at noon again.

I'm just a child naked and free,

only a man beside the sea.

Further the water, the line of dreams.

Where are you, fellows, taking me?

I don't get here often enough.

Your way is bright, empty and tough.

I only need a bit of love.

Where are you, fellows, taking me?

I'm pushing for a better life,

poorer, may be, but clear and nice.

I do not want a dice to choose

my steps, my thoughts, my words, my mood.

I'm pushing for a better life.

I think you've got me mixed up.

Further the water, the line of dreams.

Where are you fellows taking me?

I'm pusher for a better life.

Concealment perverts whereas knowledge and freedom civilize.

As well as surviving, I'm trying to live. Well... In fact, I could say: As well as trying to live, I'm surviving, because the goal of our life is not surviving but living. As well as walking safely, I'm walking freely.  What good would it be to walk (even to live) if we didn't walk (or live) freely?

Our societies are full of frightened people; frightened and sluggish. They fear trying new experiences, changing outdated habits, fighting for higher freedom. They are sluggish because they preffer to stay in their humdrum life's style than to improve their sanity by leaving old and obsessive impositions. 

I have just come from paradise, a place where people is in harmony with their own body and with the body of the other human beings. The validity of the monstrous repression of the moral doctrines of the big religions has expired. Human beings can live without a continual battle against their naked bodies. The knowledge and the usual seeing of naked human bodies doing natural and familiar activities get the sanity for all the human minds that grow in these circumstances. Concealment perverts whereas knowledge and freedom civilize.

Do you like being naked?

-Oh! You like being nude! Isn't it?

-No... In fact, I never think about being nude... What I like is feeling the Sun, the wind, the sea... on my whole skin as it was just one reality... I like doing it while I smell the pines and hear the wave's sound, and fill myself with such a beautiful landscape... If I thought I had to be nude... or if I wished the idea of being naked... I would lose all those perceptions

The little foolish things of life are the core of our life:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QFCtveFZdM

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